Indro Montanelli

Indro Montanelli (22 April 1909-22 July 2001) was an Italian journalist. He was a fascist journalist until 1940, when, after witnessing the destruction of the Greco-Italian War, he joined the Action Party of Italy, and he went on  to criticize Silvio Berlusconi's government in the 1990s.

Biography
Indro Montanelli was born in Fucecchio, Tuscany, Italy in 1909, and he became a journalist for fascist newspapers in the 1920s. He collaborated with the United Press before severing his ties to them to become a voluntary Royal Italian Army conscript during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. He wrote about the war to his father, who secretly had them published in several prestigious newspapers. Montanelli became Italy's foreign correspondent in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, and he later covered the invasion of Poland in 1939, writing of how Polish lancers charged German tanks with lances and swords (this never happened, as the Poles instead charged at infantry with machine-guns, and were repulsed with the help of German armored cars). He later covered the Winter War, and he was arrested by the Germans while covering the German invasion of Norway due to his opposition to the Italian-German alliance; he escaped with the help of his friend Vidkun Quisling.

After Italy entered the war and invaded Greece, Montanelli was alienated by the disaster, and he joined the Action Party of Italy and the Italian Resistance. He was captured by the Germans and sentenced to death, but he was transferred to a prison in Verona in 1944 with the help of some conspirators, and he escaped the transfer to flee to Switzerland. He continued to work as a journalist after the war, sympathizing with the new Hungarian government during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. On 2 September 1977, he was shot four times by two members of the Red Brigades outside of his Milan office, but he survived the incident. During the 1990s, he was a critic of Silvio Berlusconi and his personalistic Forza Italia party, and he continued to be involved with journalism until his death in 2001.